I still feel shame today that I was ever invested in G*mergate.
Granted it was during a bleak period of my life when I was so reactionary. But my god, to think these goobers are still around today, still doing racism and sexism, just moving from target to target to take out the impotent rage on.
Just reminded of it today with the "discourse" of Yasuke being in Ass Creed and G*mers changing any woman not white and waifish with AI.
Semi-unrelated but I suspect that almost no one actually dislikes Yasuke for historical reasons. He's a pretty well known figure associated with the most famous shogun to ever live. His existence is fairly well documented, and he shows up a lot in Japanese media too. I think most people with a passing interest in Japanese history will have heard of him at some point.
Maybe it's just because I'm older now than I was during Gamergate, but this new drama doesn't hold up under even gentle scrutiny.
Yeah. Yasuke is actually a perfect pick for an AC character. Fascinating person where just enough is known, but plenty of questions to fill in the blanks with AC nonsense.
its why everytime someone comes to me saying its not an issue about race in a samurai game, I tell them did you complain William in Nioh 1 and its sequel Nioh 2 was an Irish Samurai. if they didnt, suprise you might actually be a racist, because Nioh being a Japanese developed game, also proves Japan doesnt give a shit about historical accuracy and what race a Samurai is, so you couldnt play the japan would be mad about it card.
It's mainly due to a lot of GG styled ragebait videos of dudes grifting on how most people are engaged by negative shit, and nothing is more negative than being a middle aged reactionary upset about vidya games.
One of my "friends" taught me a slur in 4th grade and it made the teacher think my parents were racists lol
If you're reformed and now on Hexbear, fuck you, Jay!
A lot of us did. But look at us now! I'm proud of anyone who realized that was wrong and changed their behavior. Too many people double down on "it's just words bro" or "it didn't used to mean that. It just meant dumb".
i was suxked up into it briefly in its heyday when i was 14-15. I think people today might underestimate how persuasive it was to tween/teen boys (I didn't know ) in that phase after they've divested themselves from their parent's opinions but before they've had the chance to independently develop their own (inasmuch as one can opinions can be "independent" in society).
EVERYBODY knew games journalism as an industry was a joke— 10/10 IGN, 7/10 too much water, Skyrim with Guns, and so forth — so a "movement" claiming to be concerned about ethics in games journalism was inviting as a 14 year old dweeb with nothing better to care about.
And once you've swallowed the hook with a few alt-lite zingers from "Based Milo" Yianopaulos and Christina Sommers it's easy to accept the rest of the reactionary rhetoric that builds on it—if games journalism was being ruined by liberal pansy feminists, then all the other stuff they were being blamed for must be their fault, right?
I watched PragerU videos of my own volition () because YouTube recommended them and they built on the GamerGate stuff by offering easy answers that demanded nothing from me.
Honestly its a miracle I wasn't completely lost to online alt-right brainrot. I don't even know why I stopped believing in it, I just... did? Then I spent like a year being a generic lib before finding r/cth and beginning my slow ascent to smug communist superiority
All this to say, don't be too hard on yourself for getting sucked into something. And as someone once said, if you don't look back at yourself and cringe, you haven't grown
The best thing about the whole to me was that it showed how reactionary most g*mers are, and it soured me forever on being in any video game related online spaces unless they explicitly don't allow reactionaries.
People who knew me back then tell me I should have more empathy for the incels of today because my brain was full of holes that garbage like 4chan filled. I made fun of Anita Sarkeesian and cared deeply about "ethics in games journalism" because I was a drop out and a shut in with nothing better to focus my energy on.
If anything, I have more anger than I did back then, but its directed at the groups and institutions that perpetuate this shit and keep those 'movements' alive. I understand what it was like to have been a reactionary teenager, but I also know that I was intelligent enough to know better and none of my behavior deserves an excuse.
It's deeply sad and pathetic to me that other people my age are still posting on 4chan like they're 12 and just learned some racial slurs. And have now morphed into being "anti-woke" instead of "anti-sjw" when its all the same.
I pity them in a general sense and know the way to fixing them is to give them positive focuses for their energy and meaningful social experiences. And the removal of their idols. All the same stuff that happened to me. But reading their comments, in the moment all I feel is disgust and a want to protect people from them.
It's deeply sad and pathetic to me that other people my age are still posting on 4chan like they're 12 and just learned some racial slurs. And have now morphed into being "anti-woke" instead of "anti-sjw" when its all the same.
It is, it's the same shit shit just new lingo. It went from anti-feminism to anti-sjw to anti-woke now to anti-dei, just new buzzwords for the same old hatred of women and minorities.
I still don't know what gamergate was and I have no interest in learning. I feel like it would just be a complete waste of time. I think it had something to do with a bunch of nerds being angry a woman was taking games seriously as art and critiquing them as such?
every time you mention Dan Olson some reactionary chud comes out of the woodwork to say "umm you mean the guy that posted CP on 8kun?" oh shut the fuck up you lying sack of shit.
Even dumber than that, it was kicked off by a jilted boyfriend who aired out their dirty laundry on Tumblr and the whole discourse centered around how women keep getting a pass for everything.
But yeah, life is too short and precious to spend any of it caring about gamergate.
I think it had something to do with a bunch of nerds being angry a woman was taking games seriously as art and critiquing them as such?
That's as good an explanation as you're going to find about it. Far right operatives latched onto them and juiced it up which is why it wouldn't go away
At one point, I personally identified as an Anti-feminist. It was over a decade ago, of course, but it brings me great shame. I never considered myself conservative, I have genuine fascists in my family and never fully aligned with any of them, but I was a deeply reactionary liberal. I fell down that pipeline and nearly tumbled down the alt-right, but thankfully stopped at "classical liberalism." Please, feel free to laugh at my former self, he was (and still is, albeit to a lesser extent) a supreme dumbass of the highest order of magnitude, and should be laughed at.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
What I am trying to say, is that we are the sums of our trajectories. It's the Dialectic at work! We contain within ourselves the next version. Politzer puts Dialectical Materialism very beautifully in Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and I truly believe it helped me shed my self-hatred for being so reactionary for so long, as it was a necessary step considering my own personal Material Conditions that led to the me of today.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
This was my trajectory too. I went through a lot of rehabs and psych ward visits for my alcoholism that radicalized me and allowed me the chance to meet people very different from myself.
I truly believe it's the best path to deprogramming people. Exposure works. It's easy to dehumanize others until you work and study alongside them, until they become just as human as you.
It's also a major factor for anti-immigrant rhetoric and redlining, to keep that fascism festering.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future
I tell myself this all the time. You should always be able to look back ten years and be like "what was I thinking??" It shows growth, and it shows you won't ever stop working on yourself. Anyone born in the U.S. that has taken our path knows how much unlearning you have to do in life.
It's funny to me how all the "anti-feminist/anti-SJW classical liberals" from that era have faded away, because even if those guys didn't realize it, the whole anti-feminism/SJW thing was just a stepping stone towards fascism and now the real thing has overthrown it.
I guess it's not really funny as much as it is terrifying, but it's still kinda funny to me how irrelevant people like Thunderf00t and Amazing Atheist are now, because they were assholes.
exactly, theres something to be said about how many of us know somethings wrong with liberalism, but cannot pinpoint it exactly. Of course since the largest voice on our easiest to reach media is far right, we'd stumble down that for a bit. within a short while, it just gets more and more absurd, seeming just as wrong as liberalism. That is where marxism comes in.
I was never into GG (too old for the target demo I think) but I spent entirely too much time doing the Reddit civility fetish debate bro shit back then.
I remember seeing a bunch of the discourse around gamers being an ostracized identity that overlapped with nerds as a target for bullying, and sympathizing with this. I also remember thinking "how the hell does this play out by being exclusionary to women who work in the games industry".
The cool thing about being wrong is that it means you're still growing and alive.
We should do a watch of the original Stepford Wives. It's a really well done horror thriller that's still pretty damn relevant. Also a good time capsule of the white middle class feminism of the 70s that was often criticized at the time by more intersectional feminisms.
I think Gamergate was what made me, a slightly reactionary "lol those crazy SJWs" type at the time, throw my hands up and say "this is dork shit, who cares"
I think I was simply AFK for a couple days and then never bothered to find a good youtube video to get me up to speed for gamergate. So I saw some Anita Shavvershivvermetimbers bashing but I didn't have any context so I kept being preoccupied with something else. I still don't know what it was.
i wasn't old enough for gamergate but if it makes you feel better i was watching islamophobes back in 2017... as a muslim. it didn't last long though because somehow "the muslims are coordinating mass r*pe on teenage white girls in no-go zones in sweden" wasn't a compelling message.
I had a reactionary period of my life as a young teen and I value it. It gave me a window into their mindset that I use to understand it and better my criticism of it. I grew up a pretty devout catholic, for example, and that enables me to not have boilerplate reddit atheist criticism of it. I go for the soft spots. The real juicy morsels.
When gamergate dropped I was dating and living with a "not like other girls" woman but luckily neither of us got invested into it despite being a little "primed" so to speak. If I had been some doomer incel maybe I'd have gotten into it but the bullet was dodged. I still had some reactionary views and lots of room to grow and still do but that's life. It is a process and anyone who has 100% "correct opinions" is regurgitating something they were told without really thinking aboutit, a liar, or they've never been tested.
It's okay to look back and go "yeesh those were dark days" but don't be too hard on your younger self. You wouldn't be here without them and think about how much weirder it would be to have those growing pains now. Think about other dumb shit we do as kids like climbing a tree only to fall and break an arm. I'd rather use youthful bone growth at 14 than 45.
I remember how my irl trans girl friend brought the Zoe Quinn story to me and tried to be really serious about her (allegedly) sleeping with reviewers was a serious ethical problem. Her main exposure to news online was reddit and knowyourmeme, mostly, for some reason, the later. I immediatly wrote it off as a nothingburger because I 1. was active on tumblr at the time and had been getting my feminisism 101 education 2. have always been fairly sexually libertine, and didnt see an ethical problem with it at its core anyway. She was aghast that I didnt see a problem with it lol.
Eventually she did get off the Gamergate train but even then she said that it "got bad" and "BECAME" about harassment. I tried to tell her it was about that from the start but dropped it and decided her jumping off of it was enough. Havent talked to her in years so idk where her mindset is at and its not something you easily bring up anyway. Idk if she would have fallen for the Sweet Baby stuff or not.
For about five minutes I was interested in the fake "ethics in game journalism" thing before I saw all the death threats and hilarious racism. During that time I also watched some cring new atheist "debunk the creationists" slop, then they also got racist/sexist/transphobic lmao. They really can't hide it for long huh.
Anyway then I became a godless queer authoritankie
Don't feel too bad. I mean ffs I bought and took ivermectin early on in covid (got taken in by the supposedly promising results in latin america and the doctors promoting it on the michael brooks show). I was literally on 4chan as a kid but never got into GamerGate somehow. Not sure if it was before or after my time.
Naive question - why do you feel shame? I wasn't too invested in the events back in 2014 when they happened, but after reading the leaked "GameJournoPros" chat thread it seemed like the "Gaters" were right in their criticisms of journalistic ethics in the video games industry.
Genetic fallacies about the motivations of GamerGaters aside, if you personally advocated for ethics in journalism with pure intentions and didn't doxx or harass anyone, why would you feel shame?
Okay, so, I'm old, and I was around when you'd ask your parents to buy Nintendo magazine so you could look for the cheat codes in the back. And here's the thing about industry journalism. Not just gaming journalism, but all industry journalism; It's propaganda. There's never been any "ethics in gaming journalism" because it's not journalism. It's a captive propaganda program.
It was the most obivous tell that GG was always reactionary misogyny. People were upset about something that didn't exist and never had, and they were brutalizing Zoe and Anita and countless others in a ruthless, misogynist, racist, reactionary mob attack.
If you're accepting free copies of games, free travel, free accomodations, free hardware, gifts, swag bags, perks, bennies, bribes, you have no integrity as a journalist. You're compromised. journalism is oppositional and antagonistic. Journalists are supposed to tear down the lies of the powerful and reveal the truth.
"games journalism" has always been industry boosting with no credibility. When that fucking asshole wrote a whole misogynist screed attacking his ex, when he set off this massive years long witch hunt, he wasn't critiquing journalism. He just gave a huge amount of violent reactionaries a paper-thin excuse for engaging in misogynistic mob violence.
I'm already prepared to end this conversation quickly depending on what you consider fallacies, but GamerGate started by targeting a specific woman rumored to have slept with a Kotaku journalist for positive reviews.
From the beginning, it was misogynistic, as more of these rumors circulated about other women as well. There was a minority subsection of people who only cared about things like journalists receiving gifts from devs, which did happen and deserves criticism, but it was used as a smokescreen to legitimize a movement against women and progressive elements in gaming, such as Anita Sarkeesian's videos analyzing gender and misogyny in games.
Much like the Yasuke situation, there are probably a few people who care overly much about historical authenticity, but they amplify the voices of people who only care about it to the extent that they can downplay the accomplishments of a black person and push against those same progressive elements. Even if you never personally harassed someone, if you were a GamerGater, you gave power to people who did.
The freak out about Anita was so something. She was offering the most milquetoast, inoffensive, basic feminism 101 critiques of some games and the fash and proto-fash lost their entire goddamn mines.
Anita: "Hey did you ever think about how you can murder sex workers in Hitman? Why did they set up the game to allow you to do that? What can we learn by analyzing this question?
You shouldn't take what they said it was about at face value. Its the same with other right-wing movements like "Save the children" (really just anti-LGBTQ+), or anti-DEI (white supremacist movement).